This whole reduce-the-surface-area business is making life for developers a bit hard. Else, why would something as simple as unchecking a box and checking another become so complex? In Good old IIS6 you had to just disable anonyous access and enable Integrated Windows or Basic Authentication.

If you are using IIS7 with Windows Server 2008 (guess it is same with Vista also), here is how you can enable these authentication types.

SQL Server 2008 Management Studio does not allow “saving” a table change, when it involves recreation. This is a good feture in general terms but may not be desired in a development environment. Here is how we can ask the designer to allow such changes.

Go to Tools > Options
And in the dialog below that opens, go to Designers > Table and Database Designers

This is a simple (but often useful) tool to generate the xml schema of a database table. The tool supports only SQL Server over Windows Authentication. The source code here can be easily extended for other uses.

Often there is a requirement to get column values in a table to a concatenated string. Say, we have e-mail ID as one column on a person table and want a comma separated list of all (or a subset) of e-mail ID’s.